Talking to Kids About Drugs

[MUSIC] Hi, friends. It's Steph. Before we start today's episode, I wanted to let you know that my new book, Last Day, how to stop losing our loved ones to the opioid crisis based on this very podcast is out now. Since we launched the show seven years ago, we've given people a vocabulary to understand and talk about really hard stuff. And we've learned something pretty revolutionary along the way. That saving lives is possible. That's what the book is about. Preventing overdose, obviously, but also how to make sense of a crisis that feels so senseless and what we need to do to stop it. If Last Day has meant something to you, I hope you'll grab a copy or listen to the audio book narrated by me. Go to bit.ly/lastdaybook or wherever books are sold. I can't wait for you to read it. Okay, now let's get to the show. What's it take to be a mentor with big brothers big sisters? It takes 30 minutes in a cup of coffee, a video game, best two out of three. It takes sharing thumbs up emojis, clapping emojis, and loaded nachos at halftime. That's how you make an impact on a young kid's life. So go on. Share a few hours a month because mentorship may sound huge, but the truth is it takes little to be big. To learn more, volunteer or donate, go to bebignow.org. When I was a kid, I remember gathering every year for a dare assembly in the school auditorium. The message was, drugs are bad, don't use them, the end. And these messages shaped how generations think about drugs and drug use today. A lot has changed since then. The drugs themselves have changed, and we know what actually works to prevent and treat substance use disorder. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about how we can create smart research-backed drug education that makes a different impact on the next generation. This is last day. I'm your host, Stephanie Whittles-Wax. After losing their son, Charlie, to an accidental fentanyl overdose, Ed and Mary Ternan founded a nonprofit called "Song for Charlie" to educate families, kids, and young adults about the risks of counterfeit prescription pills and other drugs. In this episode, I'm talking to Ed and Marshallie Taylor, strategy advisor at "Song for Charlie." We talk about Charlie's last day, how the drug landscape has evolved since then, and their recommendations for the best way to talk to kids about drugs. I can't wait for you to hear this conversation. Hi, you two. Thank you so much for talking to me today and coming on the show. I've been looking forward to this conversation. Nice to meet you. Thanks for having us. Yeah, you as well. I want to just say that this conversation is really deeply personal for me. I lost my brother Harris to an overdose in 2015 and talking about my experience and the grief and learning all about the opioid crisis has just completely transformed my entire life, and I know that's very much your story as well, Ed. So I'd love to start with you, Ed, and why you're here doing what you're doing. And then we'll zoom out, and we're going to talk more about the organization and the broader context with you, Marcia. So to start, tell me about Charlie. I want to know what he was like growing up, and how would you describe him as a kid? Well, Charlie is the youngest of our three children, Mary and I had boy, girl, boy, about three years apart, roughly. And Charlie was just beloved by his older siblings, you know, the baby of the family. But he was always kind of a big kid. He was a big baby, and we used to laugh at how dense he was. He was like picking up a bowling ball, a big guy. And as he grew up, very easily made friends. I wouldn't say he was like gregarious and super outgoing, but he just had kind of a quiet magnetism to him. He drew people to him, and he had a clever, dry sense of humor. There's a story that'll choke me up. Charlie was with some friends, and the littleest boy in the class was getting picked on, and Charlie all stepped in, the big kid, and kind of pushed the other kid aside, said, "Come on, that's not nice. Be nice." And this is like fourth grade or something. And so he was really an empathetic guy, and he really just grew into this really big tall, kind of strapping guy, played football in high school, and did all those things. Just a real dry sense of humor, clever, kind of quiet in the background until he'd throw his zinger out and catch everybody by surprise and make everybody laugh. What a beautiful description of him. I have such a portrait. And the fourth grade, defending the little guy, that says everything. That would be my son. He would be defending my son, who's the little guy. We need those big guys to be defending our little ones. That's right. And then your relationship, the two of you, was there anything you two bonded over in particular, or something that sort of felt unique to the two of you in your relationship? Gosh, Charlie was really good at school, and academically really gifted. And I think we might have bonded a little bit over that. He was curious, and he wanted to ask questions about stuff. And he wanted to always learn. So, I think his curiosity about the world and exploring things was something that he and I really, really bonded over. Yeah. Curiosity kind of leads to my next question, which is about substances and kids, right? Kids are curious about all sorts of things, and can be curious and experimenting with drugs and substances and alcohol and things like that. Did you talk to your kids about that? And if so, what, what did those conversations sound like? Yeah. And, you know, every family's different. I'm actually just 12 years sober myself. So, Charlie got to see me sober for about six years before he passed. And he was proud of me about that. We come from a great big family, a clan of kind of party people, and socially getting together, and having a few pops, I like to say, is the way that we all came up. So, it was all pretty much in the open. Now, Charlie, by the time he passed, was, you know, 22 years old. And so, we were aware that he was a, you know, college kid that he partied, that he drank alcohol and smoked weed. So, there was no hiding anything. We don't have any rose colored glasses about substances or their risks or experimentation. It was kind of all on the table in our family. Yeah. Let's actually shift to Charlie's last day. This was such a unique moment in time, May 2020, early days of COVID. Can you set the scene, Ed? Right. So, our older kids were launched. So, they were sheltering or doing whatever they were doing for those first couple of months of COVID. And Charlie was in one of those schools where he went home on spring break, and then the world shut down and he was told the students were told not to come back. So, it was just Mary and Charlie and I in our place in Southern California for a couple of months. And that's kind of interesting because we had eyes on him, and we knew what was going on with him. And it was, as you said, it was a really weird time. But Charlie was coping pretty well. He would see some of his buddies once in a while. He had a friend that had like a back house where the parents would let them hang out and just, you know, beat away from everybody else during the lockdowns. But mostly he was home and classes started back up again, taking remote classes and stuff like that. He was about a month from graduating from Santa Clara University with a degree in economics. And just after Mother's Day 2020, he came to us and said, "Some of my friends are going back to campus." So, they were going back to the condos of fraternity houses or whatever. He said, "I want to go." And, well, he's 22 years old. We can't really say no, but we were very worried about him leaving. Charlie had asthma. And we knew very little about COVID-19 at that time. And we were concerned about that. But, you know, off he went. He went back up to school and went to his fraternity house and kind of moved back into his room and hanging out with his friends. So, a couple days go by and he has a job interview and was doing pretty well through that process, had a telephone interview. And so, he ended up being alone with just a couple of other kids in the fraternity house because most of the guys had gone out to kind of hang out or throw the frisbee or hit golf balls or whatever, drink some beers, spring quarter remote learning. Right. Three weeks for graduation. Yeah. You know, super motivated students. So, he's hanging in his room waiting for an interview later that evening. And he says to one's fraternity brothers, does anybody have an ex? I'm just going to like take his ex, crush this video game, wait for the phone to ring. And there wasn't the regular kind of plugs or dealers around. And so, they found some random guy online and they connected with this guy and they bought some pills. And we know all this because they used the friend's phone, not Charlie. So, we weren't locked out of the evidence there, which was kind of an interesting blessing, right? So, we were able to find out in some detail what happened. So, they connected with some guy and they bought 10 Xanax tablets. And apparently Charlie said, "Oh, this guy has a percussette too. I'll take one of those while we're at it." Now, Charlie had had a back surgery and he had been prescribed percussette. He obviously knew what Xanax was. He'd [BLANK_AUDIO] know, I'm sure he'd done this before, kind of the recreational. Let's take a pill back in my day, it would be like, let's rip a bong and throw the frisbee. These days it's like, let's have a Xanax and play video games, kind of in the same class of behavior, I think. But we know that he bought one of these blue M30s, along with 10 of what we're supposed to be Xanax tablets. And so each of the guys was going to take five and put them in their pocket. We know this because they found five of the Xanax in Charlie's pocket after he passed and they didn't find the blue pill. So we know what he took. And while I was waiting for that job interview, he took one, what he thought was a percussette. And his roommates reported that they passed by his room several times that afternoon. And he was doing exactly what he said he was going to do. He was playing video games. And then at some point they thought he was napping because he had the game on pause, the remote controller in his hand and his chin down on his chest. And they just kept walking on by and they assume Charlie's napping. And then finally they went about 730 and said, come on, we got to get Charlie out of his room. We're barbecuing some dinner. Let's go. He's been being a slug all day long. And he was gone by that time. And had been gone, we think the last time anybody talked him was about three o'clock, we know he didn't answer the five o'clock phone call. So sometime between three and five, he took that one M30 and died very quickly after that in his bed, we think, in the fraternity house. So that's how Charlie passed. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. It's just awful. Life changing, as you said, as you've experienced, I'd set Mary and I down a completely different path. And we were told later that night what happened. It makes me sad to think I actually was going to bed that night, kind of angry at Charlie, because he didn't call me to tell me how the interview went. And I have texts in my text thread saying, Charlie, come on, man, what's up? How'd it go? Right? And I'm thinking, Oh, chucklehead, college senior, God knows how the interview went. But as soon as it was over, he I'm sure he went and did something else. And then I'll never forget it was it was 10 o' 6 p.m. That number is kind of stuck in my head when Mary's cell phone rang. And she has a couple of people in her world that used the no caller ID. And one of them was at that time was her boss, who was our local Catholic priest, Mary worked for our local parish, taking care of seniors. So she thought, Oh boy, it's 10 o'clock a night. We're just about to go to bed. I can't talk to him right now. Talk to him in the morning. So she declined the call as we were getting in bed. And then the phone rang on my side of the bed. And it was no caller ID. And we said, You know, we better get that. Sorry. And I never forget he said, I picked up a phone. He said, Eddie, I need you to come to the front door. I'm standing here right now. I need to come to front door. I got to talk to you. This weird kind of self-defense mechanism that I think we all have. My thought was boy, some poor family is really in trouble for him to come and get Mary at 10 o'clock at night. He must really need her help with something, you know. And I never imagined that it was going to be us. So that was, you know, came to the door with another couple, with a couple whose son was a fraternity brother and a lifelong friend and had gone to school with Charlie from grandma school on. He had called his parents with the news. He'd been one of the kids trying to revive Charlie and fraternity house. So they broke the news to Mary and I thankfully in person, which was a blessing. You know, we didn't get the phone call, but it was, you know, just as difficult. That's how we learned about how Charlie had passed. Very confusing and shocking initially, like Charlie has died up a campus. And I'm like, who else was in the car? What hospital did they take them to? Like what could possibly have happened? Of course. It was my first thinking, some kind of a weird accident. And they said, no, we think it's drugs. And again, we had just been living with them for a couple of months. We're like, drugs. Whoa, wait. So that again, just started this rabbit hole experience for us. I have such a also physical memory of receiving that news, getting the no caller ID. And in my case, it was a detective calling from LA. And I was changing my baby's diaper at the time. And you know, pressed ignore and it happened again. And I thought, oh god, you know, and I had like imagined this so many times. I mean, it was very different our experiences, right? Because for you, it's like, you know, you were, wait, what drugs? Right. For me, I was like, oh, this, it's, it's happened. It's happening. I imagine this. And it's finally happening that shock and that surprise. I mean, where did that hit you in your body? I mean, I dropped to the ground. My knees gave out. What was that like for you? Well, I know that that was Mary's reaction was more physical. And I went kind of into a mildly catatonic state, I think, just completely stunned and shocked. I remember sitting on the couch just staring into space. And Mary was in the corner being consoled by this other couple. And I kind of just in a day said to myself, well, that's it. Everything starts from right now. And I said that to myself and my pastor is also really good friend, right? He's right next to me, standing right next to me. And I don't know what I expected. Some words of comfort or something like that. But he just puts his hand in my shoulder and he goes, yep, that's right. You know, and like, didn't try to soften it. And that has been our experience. My experience was I have a whole new list of things I have to I need. I'm looking now at the world starting right in this incident to completely different eyes. If there is one thing I am happy to invest in, it is getting a good night's sleep. I need it. And Quince makes it easy to bring a little everyday luxury into your nighttime routine. Or maybe just find a thoughtful gift for someone on your list. I recently picked up the bamboo sheets from Quince and I'm just so impressed. They are incredibly smooth and comfortable. And honestly, getting into bed at the end of a long day has become something I'm looking forward to even more. It's such a simple upgrade. But it makes my whole bedtime routine feel a little more luxurious. 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Lead with facts. Not fear. Teens can tell when you're exaggerating and they tune out. Ask questions. Listen. It's not one big talk. It's a series of small ones. And morning teens what not to use. Doesn't teach them what to do instead. Helping them build healthy ways to handle pressure gives them better options. The new drug talk is free, science-backed, and made to help parents start these conversations. Visit thenewdrugtalk.org. Caregiving. It's the rewarding, challenging work that connects all of us. I had no idea that this was what caregiving was. I kind of just thought like that's what we do for our family. So many of us can relate to this. So why aren't we talking about it more? That's what we do on Squeezed. We share the stories of the ones who care. Listen to Squeezed with the Botanical Brown, wherever you get your podcasts. Can you remember what it felt like the first time you heard fentanyl as the likely cause from the detective? I mean, what did you know about fentanyl at the time if anything? I don't think I had ever heard the word, to be honest. We unlike other parents who wait a long time to find out what happened or to confirm what the cause of death was, other parents in our situation. We knew pretty quickly because at the scene that night, one of the local cops got us on the phone and we were asking what happened, what happened, and it was chaos there. It was lights and sirens and about a thousand kids who'd come back to the small university and Charlie was a big man on campus in a fraternity. Everybody knew who he was and the word got around and it was very noisy and chaotic and he said we talked to this fraternity brothers and said could it be drugs and they said yes. My response to that was well, it's a fraternity house. That's a pretty obvious answer. What else can you tell me? We don't know anything more than that. But the next morning, there was a detective who called and very early six thirty. in the morning or so. And he said, look, you have to wait for the Tox Colony report. But this is going to be fentanyl. And Charlie will be the seven death in the last 10 days in this county from these blue pills. So that was the first that I'd kind of heard about fentanyl. We went right down that rabbit hole to find out kind of what is this. And very early on, look, we had a lot of things to do the next couple of days to figure out. But I know in my searching, I came across news stories that it had happened to other people. And that was the surface that we started scratching on real hard. I understand you had a Zoom call where you talked with your friends and family about what happened to Charlie. How did you make that decision and how did people react? And was there anything about that that surprised you? Or was it just like, no, we're obviously going to tell the truth about all this? Let's remember again that it was COVID time. And so we didn't have a funeral service. We didn't have any eulogies. There wasn't a real opportunity to explain to people what had happened. And so as the months went by and we learned what had happened to Charlie and learned that it was happening to others, we made as a family decision to, well, we're just going to go and Mary and I kind of asked ourselves, I can't believe this is happening. Like, who's telling the kids about these fake bills? And we looked around and was like, really no one, no one effectively anyway. So we said, well, maybe we should do that. And so we made that decision as a family to just do that little thing. We threw up a little website. And we decided to tell our friends and community members about the issue. And so we scheduled a Zoom. And the response to the Zoom invitation off our mailing list was such that we had to have two zooms because we met the 200 or 250 person minimum, whatever our subscription was. So I think we had two zooms that day that had about over 400 attendees. And we just explained to everyone in the community what had happened to Charlie. And that we discovered that he was not alone. That was happening to young people everywhere. And then the response was overwhelming. We had started a 501c3. We had already done that, put a little website up. And people made some donations. And that was December of 2020, first part of 2021. We said, okay, I think we're going to do this. We're going to take some steps forward to try and try and prevent some of this. It's amazing. And that's, yeah, that's the origin of Song for Charlie. What is the mission of the organization? It's evolving. The mission now, as it stands, in at this time is to help families of teens at a lesson. So, you know, young kids as they move into middle school, then into high school, then off to work or college are going to come across all kinds of substances that are now chemical based, not plant based. And so we want to try to be almost like a sense-making organization for families. How can we help families go, wow, I've heard about freedom. What is this fentanyl? There's still these fake pills out there. You know, how can I help my teen cope and navigate these emotional years without turning to substances to get by and build the resilience he or she needs to not only survive, but thrive. It's about drug education, I suppose. We're moving from awareness to education, but we're also trying to, and we knew very early on, we can't tell people don't do this without also saying do this instead. Right. And so we're leaning more into the healthier coping and building kind of real resilience and mental and physical fitness that will protect young people from the risk of these substances. Hey, it's Julia Louis-Dreyfus from The Wiser Than Me podcast, among other things, and I've got a little holiday wisdom for you. 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And on our brand new podcast, criminally online, we break down the law behind the stories you can't stop talking about. No legal degree required, just curiosity. Find criminally online wherever you get your podcasts. This is a perfect time to bring Martia into the conversation actually. Don't do this is not enough, right? As the tactic. So what is the research show actually works? If the message is not just don't do this in no alternative, what are you all finding is messaging that's more effective? Okay, so we need to go a little bit deeper beyond just don't do this because we've learned that that is not enough. That doesn't work. Kids are curious, as you said earlier stuff. And we know that if kids understand better, they'll make better choices. So for a long time in prevention science, we've known that there's really two factors that make a huge difference. One is perception of risk. So if kids really understand what the specific risk is associated with particular behavior, they'll be less likely to do it. And two is social disapproval. So teenagers above all want to be cool, right? And want to do things that are making them blend into the crowd. And if there is social disapproval, like we've seen, for example, teen smoking over time, it went from being a totally socially acceptable behavior to then kind of being perceived as gross and disgusting and something that you shouldn't do. So if you can make that kind of a change and you can have kids perceive something as uncool undesirable behavior, they're much less likely to engage in that. And then as Ed mentioned before, you know, we know that people, not just kids, people use drugs for a reason because they work in the moment to fix a problem, turns out that if you fast forward, it makes the problem even worse. So it fills the hole in the short term, makes the hole even deeper in the long term. But you need to help people find healthier ways to deal with the everyday stresses and anxieties of life that we all face. And as Ed mentioned, song for Charlie is leaning more heavily into healthy coping mechanisms and helping kids understand that, yeah, you're going to have really bad days and bad things will happen and people are going to be mean and you're going to do poorly on a test and have to deal with the consequences. But let's find a better way to be able to roll with it, then putting something in your body that could be dangerous at best and fatal at worst. I think Marsha said it really well. The landscape is just so much riskier, but also kind of unknowable. What we're learning is there's a lot of, there's a very surface level awareness about things like fentanyl and fentanyl and pills. We're about to come out with some brand new research that we've just done that kind of goes back to an old issue that we've been trying to deal with before, where we're learning that teens understand now that getting a pill from some random source is a really dangerous thing, but they actually feel pretty comfortable taking one of their friend's prescription pills. So there's a lot more work to do to get down to a deeper level of just this kind of awareness now that when we first started, nobody knew what fentanyl was or knew how to spell it. Now it's kind of in the air, the risk is it becomes a little bit of white noise and people go, oh well, everybody knows what it is now problem solved, but people have some awareness that it's out there and dangerous, but they don't really understand at a level that allows them to avoid the risk and make better decisions. So we're going to go to that deeper level on the knowledge of the substances that are out there, but also on the way to protect kids by building better muscles, you know, physical and emotional muscles to cope with it with their lives. Yeah, I think the stuff that seeps into your psyche when you're young, you know, it kind of stays. And for me, I remember very clearly just saying no was, you know, every year we had the police come in and that was the campaign. Just say no. And drugs are bad and terrible. And I remember the frying panads and this is your brain on drugs. And okay, great. So they're bad. Wonderful, check. My daughter a couple years ago when she was in fifth grade, I went to her drug seminar at school. And it was given by an addiction medicine doctor who I talk about in my book. He showed the kids a sugar packet. He held it up. He said, if this was fentanyl, this could kill 2,000 people, right? This little sugar packet. This is 40,000 doses. You know, just to visualize it was really interesting to the kids. And then he let me narchand him. He laid down on the floor and went through, like, you know, I squirted it in his nose and he jumped back up and he said, "See, I'm fine. If I'm not overdosing, you're not going to hurt me." And I just thought, wow, the fact that my 10-year-old is getting this as drug education. And as a parent, I was very heart-worn by that. Obviously, from my experience, my lived experience, I'm sure other parents might be horrified by that. But how are you all walking that line around the messaging we're giving to kids? And what is the right messaging? If any parents are listening, how do we talk to our kids about this in a way that's respectful of all the things they're going to be curious about and also like protecting them from all the harm that we're afraid is going to come their way? Ed always phrases it as just say no, KNOW. And that kids really need to know and understand and really talking through in the moment how they can respond. I'm about to send my daughter off for her freshman year in college. She's going with Narcan and she knows how to use it. And that's really important. And you have to prepare kids for the world that they live in, rather than the world that we wish they lived in, where there was nothing dangerous that could ever happen to them. So I think we need to make sure that kids have a more in-depth, more nuanced understanding and really understand the why. Why am I telling you to do this? I mean, it's sort of, you know, in the case of drinking and driving. We talk to kids about what can happen if you get behind the wheel after having something to drink or what happens if you get in the car with someone who has been drinking. They understand the stories. I think the power of stories is so important because that really gets to kids' hearts and they understand. So it's important that we convey things in a way that they're going to take it with them and not just sort of a finger-wagging message that doesn't empower them and give them some tools to know exactly what to do. I just want to add one thing because Marsha is right on there. You know, you said something stuff about respect. I think we have to respect young people's intelligence. That's something that we can do better, a better job of. And the curiosity that we talked about before, kids are curious. And what we find in our research and also in our work is kids want to know about these substances. They want to know how they work on the brain. They are curious about this. And I think if we can start what we kind of nicknamed the new drug talk. And with a starting point that says it's not really sex education, but we've got to the point with sex education where we say it's inevitable. We don't say to kids, try to go through your life and never have sex. It's kind of eventually people are going to have sex. It's going to happen. And so here's what you need to know. And yet with the drug talk, it was kind of like don't do these if you can. Most people won't do them. You shouldn't do them. People that do them get in trouble. But coming across them, the exposure to these substances in our current times is as inevitable, maybe as a sexual experience. And so if we talked to it about, hey, no judgment, you are going to bump up against some of these substances. You're going to be in situations where they're offered to you or you see them. The more they know about what those are and how to respond in those moments, the more empowered they will be to avoid whatever harms there are. I think that's such a great point. When I was researching my book, I talked to this guy Dave, who I've known for many, many years and he's in recovery, long-term recovery. But he pointed out to me, I used drugs when I had a bad day and I used drugs when I had a good day. Like I used them to celebrate. So I think we have to be, you know, there was reaching for that in both the sort of low moments and also the high moments, you know, pun intended. So I do want to point that out because it's so easy to just, oh, here's a handful of pills. Take one, right? And one thing to Marcia that you said that I want to go back to is how much our kids are facing right now in terms of challenges, right? There's high levels of anxiety, depression, isolation. And you said, you know, people don't use drugs to feel bad. They use drugs to feel better. This was a huge aha for me in my research about what happened to my own brother. So it sort of makes sense that we need to teach them alternate ways to feel better. So how do we address those risk factors? How do we proactively talk about it? And what are you all doing at Song for Charlie? That is giving people an alternative to reaching for substances. So Ed mentioned the new drug talk and a key part of the new drug talk is making sure that your kids understand all the substances that are out there. One of the challenges kids are facing is that in this new drug landscape, a lot of substances are legal or quasi-legal and they've got marketing budgets behind them, which drugs didn't before. You know, we don't have accurate messaging about the substances that are in their world and that they're encountering every day. So that's one piece. The other piece you mentioned risk factors, parents need to really have a conversation that is very open about the genetic load the kids might have for addiction. So I think it's just making this a much more open conversation than the don't do drugs conversation of the past. You know, the message still is we hope that kids aren't going to choose to use substances because we know all of the risks, but they really need to understand and have much more sophisticated conversations to help them make those good choices in the moment. Yeah, I think that's so helpful. You've both provided so much good fodder, I think, for starting conversations with our kids and how we start these conversations and what the messaging should be. I'd love for you all as we wrap up here to tell us obviously more about Song for Charlie and where we can access more of these resources for anyone who is interested in learning more. Sure. So I would urge people to go to Song for Charlie's website, which is SongforCharlie.org, where they can find resources that are aimed at teen and young adult audiences. We have films that can be used in schools, we've got Spanish language resources as well, and really things that people can not only use in their living room, but also encourage their schools to use. And then on that website, you'll also find a link to the new dog talk, which is resources that are really aimed at parents and helping them have these conversations. And if you follow Songfor Charlie, you go to our website and resources. Our goal is that we can become something that we think is so needed in this day of social media and so much noise is to be a trusted source. And so we are really working hard to make Songfor Charlie and all of our programs as reliable and unbiased and fact-based as we possibly can. And so the families will go, when I have a question about this, when I have a concern, I'm going to go to Songfor Charlie's assets and I'm going to learn as much as I can about it. That's our goal. I just can't think of anything more kind and charitable than taking this profound loss and growing it into what you've grown it into. You're going to save lives and you're going to change lives and that's Charlie's legacy. And I'm so sorry for your loss and just wishing you all the best. And grateful that you've carved out time to talk to me today. No, thank you, Stefan. Thanks for having us and sorry for your loss as well. We share that. Yeah. These tragedies are to a very high degree preventable. And so it feels good to do, spend our time and energy doing whatever we can to prevent even just one or two. Right, so that's what keeps us going. Thank you for sharing your story to stuff and just bringing this issue out of the shadows because I think that, you know, the more we can talk about it openly and the impact that addiction and substances have on families, just the better off we'll all be and just getting it all out in the open. Absolutely. It's been cloaked away for too long. Agree, hard agree. This episode is made possible by Song for Charlie, the family-led non-profit behind the new drug talk program, offering free science-backed resources for parents and caregivers. To learn more, visit thenewdrugtalk.org and follow @thenewdrugtalk on Instagram and/or Facebook. Thanks so much for listening. Last day is a production of Lemon Auto Media. Executive producers are me, Kristen LePore, and Jessica Cordova-Cramer. Our producer is Hannah Boomer-Shine. Bobby Woody mixed this episode. Music is by Hannah's Brown. Maggie Krausshore is our senior director of partnerships. You can help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Check us out online at Lemonada Media and you can find me at Whittle Stephanie, W-I-T-T-E-L-S-T-E-P-H-A-N-I-E. We'll see you next week. Hey, it's Steph. Real quick, before you go, I want to share an excerpt from my new book, Last Day, how to stop losing our loved ones to the opioid crisis. It tells the story of losing my brother Harris, the journey to creating this podcast, and the conversations that have helped so many of us understand addiction, recovery, and what it takes to prevent overdose. So please enjoy this sneak peek into what you'll get when you pick up a copy or listen to the audio book narrated by me. We hear about the opioid crisis so often that we've become desensitized to it. It's a headline, a political pawn, a collection of tally marks that stand where our loved ones should be. Overdose deaths in the United States can be broken into three phases. Dr. Prescribed Oxycontin, starting in the 1990s, heroin taking hold in 2010, and fentanyl, which surfaced in 2013 and spread like wildfire in 2016. The Sacklers, who owned the pharmaceutical company that developed, produced, and aggressively marketed Oxycontin, may have lit the match, but our broken system allowed it to burn. Since 1999, this preventable tragedy has claimed more than 800,000 lives. My little brother was one of them. Thanks for listening. Get your copy of last day at bit.ly/lastdaybook, or wherever books or audio books are sold.